those who wander
by shadowleaves
Summary: Harry Potter was on a journey. Shut up, it was a journey. It wasn't because he was bored out of his mind and that boredom and Potters don't mix. Everything was fine, he wasn't dead yet, Hedwig would actually kill him if he died, and this strange new land was seemed to be filled with enough adventure to sate the Potter boredom.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or Harry Potter. This is for entertainment purposes.

* * *

When Harry returned back to his campsite, he found Hedwig waiting for him with her latest offering.

Hedwig puffed up proudly and hooted at him, showing him the dirty furry animal in front of her.

Harry's left eye twitched. "Thank you Hedwig...?"

His owl nudged her prey at him, staring at him with those unblinking yellow eyes.

"Un... I can't eat... whatever that is." He looked at the ball of dirty fur warily, slowly inching back as his dearest owl continued to nudge it closer.

Hedwig shuffled her wings impatiently, and when Harry noticed her flinging the dead animal at him it was already too late to dodge. He cringed as his hands felt the fur matted with Merlin-knows-what and the thing's soggy nose touched his palm. Harry tilted the animal to the side and saw a slowly blinking yellow eye-

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGH!" He flung it down at the ground, letting out a blood-curdling scream and he leapt away. "HEDWIG WHY IS IT ALIVE?!"

Hedwig turned her head to look at him as if he was an imbecile. "*Hoot*."

"Oi brat," a hoarse grouchy voice came from the direction he had thrown the not-so-dead thing in, "That was very rude."

Harry shrieked and resisted the urge to apparate away there and then. When his heart finally stopped trying to escape out of his chest, he found both Hedwig and the thing staring at him with twin pairs of round yellow eyes. "What are you?" Harry asked, ignoring Hedwig's judgemental hoot.

"I am a proud member of the white wolves," it puffed up its chest, dirt and mud clinging to every strand of its fur and the occasional twig picking out. Next to the obsessively clean Hedwig, the wolf looked like a dirty rag.

The wolf was neither white or very big, only slightly smaller than Hedwig.

"I am a proud wolf... cub," the now self-identified cub added reluctantly after both Hedwig and Harry stared at it.

*And why are you here?* Harry thought miserably, staring sullenly at the cub during the silence after its proud proclamation. He turned his head to look at Hedwig. *And you had to bring him here.*

Hedwig, under his gaze, turned her head to the side and started to preen her wing as if saying *not my problem,*

*I hate my life,* Harry fell on his back and stared at the sky through the layer of forest leaves. *Hermione was right. I am a trouble-magnet, I really should sue fate for all the shit that comes my way.* As he came back from his sudden epiphany, he realized that the wolf cub had been talking the entire time.

"-bring me back!" Shiroko was looking at him, big yellow eyes as round as the moon and a note of pleading in them that he just couldn't ignore because it would like killing puppies.

"Sure?" he said in response, no clue what had been in the conversation before that but too used to digging his own grave to say anything else. The next moment he had an armful of dirty fur as the wolf cub leapt at him, panting in joy and licking his face.

"You're the best! Thank you!"

Harry sighed in resignation as he wiped away the saliva on his face with a grimace. "Let's wash you first."

It turned out the wolf was white after Harry had dunked him in the water and scrubbed at his fur with almost an entire bar of soap.

"When can we leave? Can we leave soon? I really want to see Master as soon as possible! Do you know where Konoha is? Because I'm lost and I'm not signed as a summon yet so I can't go back by myself-"

Harry humored Shiroko by humming at the right places, as he focused his eyes on getting the last stubborn stains out.

*Wait.* His hand paused in its task of slathering soap on the cub. *Konoha? Isn't that one of those ninja villages that Hermione explicitly warned me not to go to?*

Hedwig, the sadistic little creature she was, hooted in amusement as he sunk into misery.

/./././

It had been five days of traveling, with no one but Harry, Hedwig, and the now white-colored Shiroko. And it had been two days since Harry and Hedwig both entertained the idea of permanently shutting up the wolf cub.

"My master is the best! He is the strongest person out there and he feeds me the best meat everytime he calls me out. He knows exactly where to scratch me-"

It had been five full long days with the cub constantly praising this owner of his, and by this point Harry was going smash his (own) head against the nearest tree if they didn't reach this so-called Konoha soon. (Because puppies were too adorable to kill.) Hedwig sensed his mood from her perch on his shoulder and preened his hair in sympathy and an attempt to gain his forgiveness.

*You were the one who brought him back,* Harry eyed her, *So you suffer with me.*

Meanwhile, the cub sat comfortably in Harry's backpack, talking straight into Harry's left ear. "-when I get back I am going to be so pampered and maybe I'll even get a full groom. I won't have to live on wild animals anymore and and and and and and-"

Harry sighed and hung his head. This was going to be a long trek.

/./././

After another day of trekking through strange trees with overly long branches, Harry finally stumbled onto a dirt path. It was the first sign of civilization he had seen in weeks and he almost cried in relief as he realized he was almost at his destination.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, Harry could taste his freedom as merchant carts and other travelers caught up to him on the road. When the towering gates of Konoha came into sight, the cub poked its head out from where it had been napping in Harry's backpack.

"Home!"

Harry fished out the ball of fur from his backpack as he approached the guards, a pair of young men whose smiles were surprisingly genuine despite being stuck in such a tedious position.

"Welcome to Konoha! May we see your identification?"

Harry fished out the metal identification plate he had acquired at a small town in the Land of Tea, listing his name as Sue Hari and any other biographical information.

One of the man examined the plate, before writing the name down in a ledger and handing the plate back to Harry. "What is your purpose in Konoha?"

"Returning a lost pet." Harry placed the surprisingly quiet Shiroko on the table.

Shiroko turned around and whined. "I'm not a pet! I'm a proud member of the-"

"-white wolves who got lost and needed help getting home." Harry interrupted the cub's sentence, all too familiar with his monologue after six entire days spent together on the road. "Now, this is the part where you and find your owner and I get to leave." He fished out the puppy from his bag and placed him onto the desk, already imagining the quiet days he would get to spend traveling this foreign land.

As Harry was turning to leave, a sudden pain in his hand alerted him to the fact that everything was not alright.

"You bit me," he accused the cub who was still in fact chomping on his hand. "Why would you bite me?"

Shiroko turned large teary eyes on Harry and he folded like wet paper. An entire village full of trained assassins which Hermione has explicitly warned him not to enter or not, he was going to have to see this through.

Queen Hedwig decided that was the perfect moment to return after stretching her wings. There was a screech and then a white-feathered blur dive-bombed the thing that was still attached to his hand.

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-!"

"Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-"

The white balls of fur rolled off the desk and crashed into the ground, stirring up a miniature dust storm with their brawl.

Harry ignored the chaos going on with the air of a sage and turned to the two stunned gate guards. "So," he stretched his hand out to the side after he realized blood was dripping on his boots, "Do you know who the speaking dog belongs to?"

* * *

A/N: I'm not dead, I'm just in hibernation.


	2. Chapter 2

I hate you 2

The two gate guards took pity on him, one of them escorting him and his furry companions to the hospital while the other went to find the owner of the menace.

"So how are you finding Konoha so far?" The guard asked, in a desperate attempt to break the awkward silence.

"Troublesome," Harry sighed as he mourned the loss of his sanity, as he clutched his sluggishly bleeding hand to his chest. Hedwig was now perched on his shoulder, glaring down at Shiroko as the cub curled into a ball in his backpack. The decent human thing to do would be to respond to the guard's question in a socially acceptable manner, but he'd just been bitten by prepubescent Draco Malfoy in animal form and was feeling spiteful at the world as a whole.

The gate guard looked even more awkward now, running his hand through his hair as he tried to think of a proper response. After another minute, he decided to address the lump in Harry's backpack instead. "So, you're a summons right? Which contract are you from?"

_Oh no_, Harry thought as the ball of fur peeked out from his bag. _Here we go aga-_

He didn't get to finish his thought as a low growl of "SHIROKO" came from behind him and a much heavier weight bowled him over. Hedwig took off with an offended screech and swerved around to look at their attacker while Harry pretended to be the world's most unwilling cushion.

"Byakuya!" A deeper, more human voice shrieked in alarm, "Oh kami I'm so sorry are you okay-"

Harry drowned out the voice as the weight finally lifted from his back and he rolled over to appreciate how blue the sky was. It felt so nice to live and breath again, it'd been so long since he'd been able to appreciate the gentle clouds drifting across the sky...

"Hari-san? Hari-san?! HARI-SAN?!" His view of the sky was blocked as the gate guard knelt down next to his cooling corpse, brown eyes widened in panic.

Harry sighed. It was so hard to get a moment of peace to himself and enjoy the small things in life. Hedwig nipped his ear in irritation and Harry grabbed the hand extended to him to stand up. When he finally stood up, he realized that the hand wasn't the gate guard's, and instead belonged to a chin. It took him longer than necessary to realize that the chin was in fact attached to a head, which had white hair. A lot of white hair.

"Are you okay, Sue-san?" The grandpa had a surprisingly young voice, wait maybe it was a grandma the hair was pretty fluffy so you couldn't really-

"Hedwig!" His beloved, loyal, and resident winged terror decided to bite his ear hard enough to draw blood. Harry turned around and saw the gate guard desperately gasping for breath and the widened eyes of the man before him, and realized that his brain-to-mouth filter must have turned off at some point.

In fact, Shiroko was whimpering as he was held by the scruff by a bigger white wolf, who had the animal equivalent of Molly Weasley's expression after any of Fred and George's pranks.

Another minute passed in awkward silence and the gate guard fell on his side, laughing so hard he was crying.

"Ah, sorry?" On closer inspection, the guy's face really didn't have wrinkles, so there was no way he was that old. Harry stared intently at the guy's face as he mentally cataloged the in fact very young looking features. There were eyebrows, even though they were white, a lot of older people had thinning brows. The same logic applied to his hair, and upon closer examination it seemed more silver than white and was somehow very shiny.

"Ahem." A deep, masculine voice coughed, and Harry blinked in confusion as he snapped out of a daze he didn't realize he'd entered.

"I'm actually very sorry," he let out a long suffering sigh, "I don't know what's gotten into me today. I'm normally not so easily distracted."

The man in front of him looked even more uncomfortable at that. "Ah, that, um, might be the fault of Shiroko over there. His saliva contains a mild paralytic. So when he bit you-"

It took Harry a few seconds to process the words, but by then, her majesty Hedwig the Great had screeched loudly and proceeded to once again divebomb Shiroko. Molly-Weasley-in-wolf-form practically threw her spawn at the angry owl, staring at the scuffle with cold and angry eyes as Hedwig tried to tear the cub some stripes.

Harry sighed again. This time, it was the saddest and longest and most resigned sigh of all sighs. The guy in front of him was frantically spewing out apologies and gesturing something, but Harry was too deeply entrenched in his cycle of exasperation to really listen.

The Potter luck was actually beyond impressive. Maybe instead of actually fighting Voldemort, he should've just written Tom Riddle Jr. onto the Potter family tree and then fate would've done it all for him. Accidentally tripping headfirst into a Japanese shrine while on vacation, waking up in the middle of a deserted island surrounded by whirlpools, getting bitten by a poisonous wolf cub while trying to do an act of goodwill...

Harry didn't know his lungs were capable of giving out an even longer sigh than The Sigh a few seconds ago, but apparently he defied the odds. This caused an even bigger ruckus around him until someone hauled him up in a bridal carry and he blinked and opened his eyes in a hospital lobby. He couldn't even muster up the effort to sigh again at what was happening.

"HELP! SOMEONE HELP! HE'S NOT BREATHING!"

Harry decided he'd stop breathing just for the sake of not breathing. And to give a big fat big middle to the Potter luck. The Potter luck wouldn't have a target if he was dead and there weren't any Potters left, ha!

"Sakumo, what's happening here?! You better give me an explanation this second or I'll send you back to your son bald!"

"Um- my summon bit on him accident with a paralytic and he's a civilian and now he's not-"

Harry stared up at the ceiling and gave an internal cheer as his vision darkened around the edges. Screw fate!

"I SWEAR TO KAMI-SAMA SAKUMO YOU'D BETTER MOVE YOUR ASS AND HIS TO THE ER THIS MOMENT BEFORE I CAN STRANGLE YOU-"

Another dizzying rush of something and Harry saw the bright lights of an operation room above him. He decided that these lights were too bright. Harry closed his eyes and decided that now was as good a time as any to take a nap. He deserved it after the chaos he's had to deal with before lunch.

Senju Tsunade and Hatake Sakumo watched in silent amazement as the civilian on the operation table sniffled quietly in his sleep.

"HATAKE SAKUMO WHAT THE-"

"Too loud," their supposedly non-breathing victim mumbled and turned on his side, "wanna sleep."

The next moment, the screams of harried nurses burst into the room and the door slammed open. An elegant white owl swooped in and dropped another white ball of fur on Sakumo, the settled itself primly on one of the machines in the room and started to preen her feathers.


End file.
